Let me elaborate.

Dear blog readers, you get a nice view into my historical world this evening as I share with you part of my critical view on a lecture that I attended just today.

Firstly, I would like to thank the lecturer in question for opening his research up to the slings and arrows of our studious minds. Believe me when I say, I'm sure there will be a lot of slings and arrows directed at him for the lecture. Not that it was bad research, but that in my opinion, his area of study was misdirected as it leaned too heavily to one focus of his title, whilst totally neglecting his other subject areas. The lecture was called 'Auditing Leviathan: Corruption, growth and state formation in the 18th Century'. It certainly had a lot about corruption, specifically referring to several generals at the turn of 1700 until circa 1720. Now I recognise that generals are often at the forefront of state formation and whilst I recognise that he was suggesting that corruption was an integral part of state policy in Britain - which was his focus - and whilst they used it as a method of both gaining money and speeding up the bureaucratic system in place, he in no way attempted to suggest that this allowed for success on the field of battle or off it, save for one fleeting reference when bureaucratic inefficiency nearly cost Britain a significant battle. In my opinion, he should have focussed a lot more on the the difference between the corrupt but efficient state and the incorruptible but inefficient state. A significant comparrison between battles fought at the different points would go a long way towards helping his case. Also, he made no attempt to show anything to do with the growth of the nation, except for one graph at the beginning of the lecture that made little reference to corruption or to the formation of Britain.

In my opinion, therefore, he needed to neatly tie everything together more and to elaborate a lot more on the state as a whole, rather than focus on individuals who exploited the system, ok they had a part to play, but they were not the be all and end all of state formation.

Thanks for reading, I need to expand on this further before I turn it into the 1,500 word critical review, but this I hope has been a decent start.